No.
“What did you do, Ainsley?”
“The only thing I could do,” she whispered. When she met my eyes, there were tears in hers.
I swallowed, considering backing up and driving away just as I saw a police cruiser pulling into the driveway behind me. It was a setup. She’d planned all of this. I was trapped. This was over.
I swallowed, looking at her warily. “I’d rather you’d have killed me.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
AINSLEY
“Ainsley, what did you do?” he asked again, shaking his head in disbelief. “You can’t be serious.”
“You gave me no choice. I had to do it for the kids.”
I spied Detective Burks making her way toward us, not looking particularly pleased.
“Who is that?” Peter asked.
“The detective working our case,” I said, reaching for my door and stepping out of the car, meeting her halfway. I felt as if I were going to be sick.
“Mrs. Greenburg.” She said my name as a full sentence, and I couldn’t read her emotions.
My hands were freezing, and I clutched them together in front of my stomach. “Detective. I’m sorry to have to do this—”
“What’s this all about?” Peter asked. I heard the car door shut and the crunch of the gravel underneath his shoes before he appeared next to me.
“Oh, just doing a bit of light gardening,” she said. “You a big gardener, Mr. Greenburg?”
“Can’t say that I am.” The skin of his neck flushed pink.
“Really? Well, your wife says differently.” She eyed me, and soon enough, they were both looking at me.
“What’s she talking about, Ainsley?”
“I told her about the bodies, Peter. About the email you were planning to send, the one I found—your confession. I told her about the women. I gave them permission to excavate the woods. To give their families peace. I’m so sorry.”
He stared at me with a blank look in his eyes, as if I were speaking a language he couldn’t understand. “I’m sorry, what are you talking about? Is this a joke?” He pointed a finger gun at the detective. “Is this a prank? Did Beckman put you up to this?” He looked around as if waiting for someone to jump out of the woods and shout, ‘Surprise!’
“I’m afraid this is no joke, Mr. Greenburg.” The detective studied him silently for a few moments.
Peter looked at me, his expression turning stony. “Is this because of the divorce? Is this your way of getting back at me?”
“Divorce?” the detective asked, folding her arms across her chest as she stared at me.
“My wife and I are in the process of getting a divorce,” Peter told her. “It’s been very messy and painful for the two of us. I’m really sorry if she brought you here and wasted your time, but surely you have to realize she’s joking. I mean, do I look like a killer to you?”
“You do know most serial killers are middle-aged white men, don’t you?” she snapped.
“Right.” Peter looked down. “Well…I mean, there are no bodies here, so whatever she’s told you, she’s wrong. And this is my property, too. Don’t you need my permission as well as hers?”
“As luck would have it, no. I don’t.”
I suppressed a smile.
“Your wife forwarded me an email with a confession, allegedly from you, claiming you’ve killed multiple people and buried their bodies in your woods. The email contained the exact location of the bodies, including longitude and latitude, and a marked-up Google map. Care to explain?”
“I don’t know anything about any email,” he said firmly, waving his hands to the side as if he were an umpire calling someone safe. “This has gone far enough. Ainsley, seriously, you’ve done a lot of terrible shit, but is this really how you want this to be? I thought we could be civil. But filing a fake police report?”
“It’s not fake, and you know it!” I argued. Why weren’t they arresting him already? Why wasn’t the detective backing me up?
“There are no bodies in the woods,” he said, his fingers near his temples.
I shot a glance at Detective Burks as she held up a hand to stop the argument.
“As it turns out, Mrs. Greenburg, he’s right.”
“What?” The swooping sensation in my core was back. The ground all but torn out from underneath me. “What do you mean?”
She gestured toward the crowd of detectives and officers milling about around the perimeter of the house. Looking closer, I realized they were all making their way back toward their cruisers. “We excavated the marked area, and the entire surrounding area on your word that there was something to find and there wasn’t. No bodies. Just what looked like the skeleton of an old dog.”